Hreflang tag definition and examples

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Imagine this. You are Irish. You live in Ireland. I mean, The Republic of Ireland. You want to buy clothes from Tesco. So you go to Google, start typing tesco clothing and you click on the tesco.com website that pops up. You choose your best fit and want to buy it. And – damn! – it’s only available in the U.K.

Some top-notch International SEO research was done in February. We kicked off the month by discovering new Valentine’s gift ideas and unraveled the secret of Hreflang. What are your predictions for the top 15 ecommerce markets in 2017 – will China prevail over US in sales? Check out the most exciting and informative blog posts of February:

Lovespoons and Mass Weddings; Valentine’s Day Traditions and Gift Ideas From Around the World

We dug deep into search engine analytics and cultural facts surrounding Valentine’s Day traditions. By researching customs from Italy, Finland, Wales and the Philippines we discovered new gift and retail campaign […] Read more

First things first. What the heck is Hreflang tag, otherwise known as the “link rel alternate” tag, anyway? The short answer is: it tells search engines the relation between different language/country versions, so the they can serve result to users searching in that language/country. If you want to dig more into the topic, Moz did quite a comprehensive post about it. However, we are here today not to give you a lecture on Hreflang 101 but to bust one popular myth: “Is it true that Hreflang ultimately solves all geo-targeting issues?” *Spoiler alert* It does not!

When it comes to selling and advertising cars, it is very important to make sure that search engine results are referring to the right domain. This is because not every car model is available to every country. A good example may be Škoda´s Rapid Spaceback Scoutline, introduced in 2015, which was not available for the UK. Hence if a customer is searching from google.de and the organic result shows an austrian Škoda website, it may create an impression that such a car is not yet available in Germany. This is what happened to some of Škoda´s car models.

In today’s post we will be analyzing Royal Dutch Shell company and its search engine results page (SERP). Since Shell is a multinational enterprise it has to maintain content for all of them. Naturally, when you are dealing with that many languages, mistakes can arise. The question is: which? Let’s see.

Running an international company is difficult in every aspect. Foreign market provides not only new opportunities, but also poses new threats. This applies to every business. Today we will analyze Volkswagen´s problems in their international SEO strategy and show how geotargeting can be more precise.

Problem #1 Page language doesn’t match the query

Let’s go to google.co.uk and search for the keyword: vw multivan. It refers to the model of the car and do not have any location attachment. What do we get? German page (.de domain) appears 2nd in the search results. Moreover, no UK version is available when we are […] Read more